this isnt an official game question, but its related.. i was just wondering if anybody has seen the .hack//sign anime series and is it worth getting? i love the .hack games and if the anime fleshes out the story, i would buy it. anybody?

.hack spread itself too thin period. Cut both the games and the anime down to half the size, and it'd be better. I suppose the padding helps for the MMO thing in a weird way, at least for the game, but meh.

I enjoyed .Hack//SIGN, but like most people, I found painfully slow-moving and boring a lot of the time. A lot of episodes the characters sit around basically repeating everything that's already known, and the series would have been a lot better on a 13-episode or so format.

One thing that few can deny, though, is that .Hack//SIGN has one of the greatest soundtracks in anime.

Unless you're patient or you can stomach several episodes a day, you probably don't want to watch it.

I watched .Hack//Roots too. I'm a big fan of .hack. Still, this series fell short on a few areas.

First, the characters were pretty shallow. Unlike .Hack//SIGN, which was interesting not only for the story, but also for what you learn about the characters as the series progresses, .Hack//Roots had boring and lame characters most of the time. Probably the worst part of this is that the characters don't feel very human at all, especially the main character. His actions don't make much sense and are overly angsty. The character in SIGN were characters you can actually understand a little. The only character I found really interesting was Phyllo. If the series actually focused on telling you something about the characters rather than keeping all of them mysterious and cool, the series would be decently impacting. The way it is, it's just a normal action series.

Second, the soundtrack was unique and catchy at times, but it kept playing at the most unnecessary of times. It just felt out of place and ruined the mood all the time. It's not particularly good, either. Just really...weird. Well, it's definitely impressive.

Personally I don't think it moves very slowly, especially when compared to SIGN. There's a decent amount of actual action and fighting in the series instead of sitting around talking back and forth. As far as plot pacing goes, it's probably worse than SIGN, mainly because there's no real plot. The entire series is dedicated to setting up things for the game, instead of trying to be its own story like SIGN.